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Division II Faculty Publications Social Sciences

2-1-1994

Review of "Ascesa e Caduta di una Famiglia di Asraf

Sciiti di Aleppo: I Zuhrawi o Zuhra-Zada" by
Marco Salati
Laurie Nussdorfer
Wesleyan University, lnussdorfer@wesleyan.edu

Recommended Citation
Nussdorfer, Laurie, "Review of "Ascesa e Caduta di una Famiglia di Asraf Sciiti di Aleppo: I Zuhrawi o Zuhra-Zada" by Marco Salati"
(1994). Division II Faculty Publications. Paper 38.
http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div2facpubs/38

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Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Laurie Nussdorfer
Reviewed work(s):
Ascesa e Caduta di una Famiglia di Asraf Sciiti di Aleppo: I Zuhrawi o Zuhra-Zada (1600-
1700) by Marco Salati
Source: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 139-140
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/164073
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 Reviews 139

This is a significant study that is seriously researched and well written. It deserves to be
read thoughtfully by all scholars of the Arab-Israeli conflict and should be included in col-
lege and university libraries that maintain collections in that controversial field.

MARCO SALATI,Ascesa e Caduta di una Famiglia di Asraf Sciiti di Aleppo: I Zuhrawi o

Zuhra-Zada (1600-1700) (Rome: Istituto per l'Oriente C. A. Nallino, 1992). Pp. 186.

BY LAURIENUSSDORFER,
REVIEWED History Department, Wesleyan University, Middletown,
Conn.
This is a study, based on the author's 1990 dissertation for the University of Rome, of the
last few generations of an Ashraf family who occupied a prestigious place in Aleppo soci-
ety from the 12th to the 18th centuries. Salati hopes that his investigation of the Zuhrawi
family in the 17th century will illuminate the larger history of the Ashraf, descendants of
the Prophet, not only in Aleppo but in the Ottoman Empire as a whole. He also seeks to re-
claim the 17th century as a period to be understood in its own right and on its own terms,
rather than being viewed only as the forerunner to Aleppo's more dramatic 18th century.
Drawing exclusively on sources in Syria, chiefly the thousands of documents composing the
registers in Damascus of the sharica court of Aleppo and five volumes of waqf acts in
Aleppo itself. Salati has pieced together the genealogy, public offices held, and business
dealings of the Zuhrawi family.
His book begins with a brief survey of the noble lineage of this family from the 12th to
the 17th centuries and of the pious endowments established by them before the Ottoman
conquest of Syria in 1517. Salati then traces the features of the Ashraf as a group in Otto-
man Aleppo. A tiny minority of the population-1,680 out of 80,000 in 1537-the Ashraf
were always more prominent in Aleppo than in other town, although the reasons for this
were a mystery even to the Ottomans. As a group they ranged in socioeconomic status from
humble craftsmen to substantial merchants and functionaries, and they were to be found in
all sections of the city and even outside the city walls. After an initial period of suspicion,
the Ottomans confirmed their ancient privilege to be judged only by other Ashraf and gave
them exemptions from certain taxes.
Salati argues for the citywide prestige and importance of the official who headed the
Ashraf, the naqib al-Ashraf, despite the community's tiny size. The naqib was counted
among the elite of local dignitaries, and his voice was heard by Ottoman officials on prob-
lems of commerce, taxation, food supply, safety, and administrative misconduct; it was par-
ticularly decisive in judicial testimony. The naqib in Aleppo was "the image of justice,
rectitude, experience, respect and prestige" (p. 38). Salati is quick to point out the material
advantages that could accrue to an official with this image, when supplemented by personal
and family standing, influence, wealth, and connections. To the naqib al-Ashraf might well
go those posts of public trust as administratorof pious endowments that could so often pro-
vide opportunities to acquire profits and to expand client networks. This section prepares us
to appreciate the social and political significance of the Zuhrawi family, whose members
held this key office for the Ashraf during much of the 17th century.
Before turning to the biographical chapters that form the centerpiece of his research, Sa-
lati briefly discusses the evidence for his contention that the Zuhrawi parted company with
both the Ashraf and the other Aleppine Muslims in their religious affiliation and were the
last remnantof Aleppo's medieval Shi'ism. The evidence is sparse and indirect; there is cer-
tainly nothing from the pens of the Zuhrawi themselves, though they do provide funds for a
pilgrimage to the Shi'i sanctuaryof Husayn at Karbalain one of the pious endowments they
140 Reviews

set up. Despite its silences and ambiguities, however, it is enough to convince Salati, for
whom their "Shicite identity" is an importantpart of the family's fascination.
Given the Ashraf's general prestige and the prominence of the Zuhrawi family, the "rise
and fall" in Salati's title refers not to the family's whole history but to the economic and po-
litical fortunes of men in only two generations of one branch: Ahmad, active from ca. 1630
to the late 1670s, and his brother, and Ahmad's son, Hasan, active from 1660 to the late
1680s. A third of the book is devoted to their activities, painstakingly reconstructedfrom the
registers and waqf documents. Both father and son hold the post of naqib al-Ashraf and be-
come waqf administrators,and both use these offices to help build up the family's patrimony
by marriagealliances, credit arrangements,and diversified investments. Salati's detailed dis-
cussion of the Zuhrawi's economic strategy confirms many of the findings of Bruce Mas-
ters's The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and
the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600-1750 (New York, 1988), which he frequently cites.
The Zuhrawi are not averse to commerce (they invested in soap making), but they made their
real profits from lending money to rural villagers to pay taxes to the Ottoman state. They are
largely indifferent to urban real estate and commercial enterprises. Their economic goals
seem to be to establish themselves as patrons to client villages and to gain a monopoly over
all village resources, from imposts to grain. What is interesting is to see how the role of
waqf administratorcan aid such an agenda. Success greets their efforts, and the family ends
the century with a substantially improved portfolio.
So why the "fall"? It is mysterious, precipitous, and indubitable. First, the Zuhrawi cease
to be chosen as naqib al-Ashraf after 1666. Salati thinks this is because of their Shi'ism,
which he suspects was exploited by a rival, and he argues that the loss of the office cut them
off from tax farming just at the moment when it shifted to an even more lucrative system
(malikana). But the real reason for the "fall" is the failure of the male line, which dies out
under the burden of no less than ten onslaughts of plague between 1678 and 1744. By 1755
all of this ancient Ashraf lineage, even the family compound in Aleppo, was gone.
Salati wishes to see the 17th century on its own terms, and in his careful reconstruction
of the predatory townsman's takeover of the countryside he certainly highlights a crucial
phenomenon of that century. But he cannot resist looking forward to the striking develop-
ments in Aleppo that follow the close of his story. While his book sheds no light at all on
the sources of Ashraf turbulence in the 18th century, he does make the case that the emer-
gence of a local group of notables in the Ottoman Empire in the late 1700s had roots in the
family strategies of the 1600s. Salati may have had grander ambitions for his subject, but
this carefully researched study offers a useful contribution nonetheless.

SURAIYA
FAROQHI, Herrscher uber Mekka. Die Geschichte der Pilgerfahrt (Munich: Artemis
Verlag, 1990). Pp. 351. (English version, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the
Ottomans [London: I. B. Tauris, forthcoming 1993].)

REVIEWED BY L. SCHATKOWSKI
SCHILCHER,
Departments of History and Arab and Islamic
Studies, Villanova University, Villanova, Pa.

There are few institutions of Islamic history that are as well-suited as the Meccan pilgrimage
for providing us with insights of a long-term and multiregional nature.By virtue of its critical
link to state legitimacy, its regularity, its geographic centrality and spread, and the records
it produced casting light on multifaceted social, diplomatic, and economic importance, the
hajj is a historian's delight. Taking the pilgrimage as a microcosm, this extremely well-
researched study supports the notion that far from the monolithic "traditional society" con-
temporary Middle Eastern political scientists would project, the early-modern and modern